AutoUpgrade – New Version with RAC Database Upgrade Support

Thanks to all our customers who participated in our evaluation test for RAC upgrade support with the AutoUpgrade Tool. And my colleagues worked hard to deliver the new version as quickly as possible. Just to make sure: This is not an April’s fools blog post. Since 2 days, you can download AutoUpgrade – New Version with RAC Database Upgrade Support.

AutoUpgrade - New Version with RAC Database Upgrade Support

Picture by: Jason Yuen on Unsplash

Where to download it?

As usual, you can download the newest version – in this case 19.8 aka 20200327 from MOS Note: 2485457.1:

You simply copy the new version into your 19c (or 12.2.0.1 or 18c) Oracle Home and overwrite the previous “autoupgrade.jar“.

What is new – and what are the limits?

Of course the support to upgrade RAC databases is new in this version. We did support this before already but with extra steps. You could find them in AutoUpgrade – Data Guard, RAC and Restart. But these manual steps are not necessary anymore.

Still, there are some things to know, and two limits:

  • AutoUpgrade does not upgrade your Grid Infrastructure (GI) and Clusterware component (OCW)
  • You always must upgrade GI/OCW at first – then you can upgrade your database(s)
  • If you SPFILE is managed locally (i.e. in file system instead of ASM) the tool won’t be able to handle this
  • Due to the nature of the MS Windows architecture, we don’t support RAC upgrades on Windows right now with AutoUpgrade’s end-ti-end automation

But my colleagues have added all the RAC explanations to MOS Note: 2485457.1 as well. I won’t copy&paste them here but they included:

  • Requirements for using AutoUpgrade with RAC
  • AutoUpgrade Process Flow for RAC
  • Preparing RAC for use with AutoUpgrade
  • Scope Limits
  • File System preparation

Known Issues – Time Zone Upgrade

Actually thanks a lot to Peter Lehmann for pointing me to this brand new MOS Note: 2575477.1. When upgrading a RAC database to 19c with AutoUpgrade, you may spot this error in the alert.log:

ORA-00603: ORACLE server session terminated by fatal error
ORA-01092: ORACLE instance terminated. Disconnection forced
ORA-39701: database must be mounted EXCLUSIVE for UPGRADE or DOWNGRADE

During postfixups phase it looks as the upgrade would hang with the time zone upgrade. You may see in the autoupgrade.log:

2020-06-23 11:00:00.123 INFO Error opening file [/xxx/xxxxxx/xxx/xxx/xxxxx/xxxx/dbs/inixxxxxx.ora] for reading.

The reason for this “hang” is that AU tries to restart the database but the DB Configuration still shows the Oracle Home as the old RAC Home. This does now work obviously.

$ srvctl config database -d xxxx_xxxxx
Database unique name: xxxx_xxxxx01
Database name: xxxxx
Oracle home: /xxx/xxxxxx/xxx/xxx/xxxxx/xxxx/12.1.0.2/RAC       <<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Two workarounds exist:

  1. User prefix.timezone_upg=no in the config file
  2. $ srvctl upgrade database -d db-unique-name -o oraclehome
    where db-unique-name is the database name assigned to it (not the instance name), and oraclehome is the Oracle home location in which the database is being upgraded. Then complete DST/TZ upgrade with the time zone upgrade scripts.

Further Information and Links

–Mike

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